I’m messing around with Instiki, a wiki program that was astoundingly easy to set up on the Mac and which might serve as a good scratch-pad for me to mess around with words-wise, and I noticed something the phrase Camel Case mentioned in the sidebar. After a while I realised what it meant – capitalised words squashed together to make new ones or, in the case of wikis, make links of them. So BugPowder, which is how I’ve always written it since coming up with the name circa 1996, is camel cased, in that it looks like a camel. And that really pleases me with big grins and everything.
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About this site
In June 2000 I started blogging at peteashton.com and 10 years later in June 2010 I decided to stop. Blogging here, that is. I started a clean slate over on I Am Pete Ashton and maintain all manner of other web presences which are all listed here along with my contact details.
You probably came here via a Google search or from following a link on some old blog post somewhere. I hope what you find is useful in some way, though do check the publication date - it might be rather old now.
Thanks for your eyeballs.
Pete Ashton
Technology and Computer Science seems to be be the last great bastion of new language, especially at grass roots level. I know Wired has the monthly article Jargon Watch which tries to keep track of it: there’s always something interesting in there. Glancing through the August edition, it cites:
Shag Phones
Prepaid phones used by a couple involved in an illicit affair.
Tivo-proofing
The act of embedding products and advertising within TV shows so that owners of digital video recorders can’t skip the commercials
Scanlation
The practice of scanning Japanese manga comic books and posting them on the Web with English translations.
Squid Squad
A scientific team that patrols the ocean’s depths in search of giant squid.
Not bad, eh. One of my favourites was always:
Code Pie
A piece of pizza eaten after writing a particularly satisfying piece of code (I think it had a couple of other meanings as well).
These words always seem to be inventive and have a sense of fun about them. The corporate stuff can be a bit prosaic – the Microsoft stuff: Excel, Access – or can try too hard – DreamWeaver, Fireworks – but Google, eBay, Linux, flickr etc have all got a love of language and a creativity about them that most non-Geeks wouldn’t credit Geeks with having. And sometimes it is born out of neccesity, like in the case of Camel Casing, which I guess happened because the filenames during the early days of computing had to be short but also needed to be descriptive.
I didn’t realise that that sort type of writing had a name. Excellent.